Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) are two protocols that are widely deployed in home and mobile networking applications. While UPnP is traditionally popular in the home consumer space, SIP tends to be popular in both home and mobile environments. Although attempts have been made to bridge the SIP and UPnP technologies, such attempts have been limited by the capabilities of the devices.
FIG. 1, for example, is a schematic diagram illustrating a system 100 in which an exemplary UPnP device 102 (e.g., an audio/visual server) and an exemplary SIP device 104 (e.g., a cordless phone) are attempting to communicate. One approach in which the SIP device 104 and the UPnP device 102 may be bridged is via a home gateway that requires SIP extensions (e.g., Session Initiation Protocol for Instant Messaging and Presence Leveraging Extensions, or SIMPLE) on the SIP device 104. A second approach requires either a UPnP stack on the SIP device 104, or a SIP stack on the UPnP device 102. Thus, existing solutions are limited to situations in which the end device(s) have a required capability even to enable minimal interoperability. In other words, these solutions are not extensible to legacy devices that may already be deployed in a user's network. A legacy SIP device is a single-mode device that only supports the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comments (RFC) 3261 SIP features. A legacy UPnP device is a single-mode device that only supports UPnP capabilities as specified by Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) 1.0 guidelines.
Moreover, existing approaches to bridging the SIP and UPnP technologies typically do not support bidirectional internetworking. That is, while the approaches enable an SIP device (with extensions) to access UPnP services, no attempts have been made to make a service offered by a user communication device (e.g., an SIP device) accessible to a UPnP network.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for bridging Session Initiation Protocol and Universal Plug and Play devices.
To facilitate understanding, identical reference numerals have been used, where possible, to designate identical elements that are common to the figures.